Andrey the Nomad

I moved here to be closer to nature, and then spent a long time catching very little of what people around me were saying.

I write Finnish IRL - the word cards, the articles, the examples, the dialogues, and whatever is wrong with any of them.

I moved to Finland a few years ago because of work. It was also a conscious choice: I wanted to get closer to nature and slow down a little.

I was lucky with how it started. My employer was running Finnish classes at the office, so from about my first week I was in one, and the deeper dive into the local culture started at the same time. My colleagues were friendly enough to guide me through the phrases I was learning. One of them got so excited that I was starting that she began using more simple Finnish even in our work conversations. I loved the support.

And it is a good feeling when a neighbour greets you in the morning with Terve and you think, I know this one.

It was not an easy journey

After the basics I was still struggling to get what people were saying. Moi, kahvi, and not much past that.

What gets taught first is kirjakieli, the written standard, and the room is speaking something else. Minä is mä. Olen is oon. Menemme is mennään.

You cannot skip ahead to those forms either. It takes a lot of grammar and book Finnish first before you get that famous aha moment, and there is no way around that part. What there can be is the two forms sitting next to each other while you do the work, which is the thing I wish I had had.

What I can tell you, and what I cannot

Experience of the problem. Not authority over the language.

What I can tell you is which word stopped a conversation dead, what it turned out to mean, and what the course had put in its place instead. What I cannot tell you is anything a Finn has not checked - which is why every word on the schedule carries a native speaker's note against it before the page gets written, and why a correction that arrives by email goes into the page rather than onto a list.

I also do not think there is a finish line here. It is constant learning and improvement with this language. A friend of mine has put a lot of time into it beyond courses: using it when dating, in every everyday situation, even going to meetups with elderly people to exchange books and take part in those conversations. To me his Finnish is amazing and sounds native. He still thinks there is a lot of room to improve, and not only with the idiomatic expressions - with the pronunciation too.

The site does not teach grammar, does not prepare anybody for a test, and makes no promise about what you will be able to say. It is built around the half of the language you can get without anyone else's cooperation, which is understanding it.

How a word gets checked

Five steps, in this order, every time. The one that matters is the last.

It starts with not understanding something

Every card on this site began as a word that went past me in a real room - a tram, a coffee break, a group chat at midnight. Nothing here was picked off a frequency list.

Find the written form first

The pair is the product. If a word has a kirjakieli form, the page shows the two side by side; if it genuinely has none, the page says so instead of inventing one.

Check it where spoken Finnish is actually recorded

A dictionary of standard Finnish does not document mä, oon or mennään, so a dictionary alone cannot settle a question about them. Every page carries at least one source that is not one.

Ask where it does not travel

A great deal of what sounds like Finnish is Helsinki. Handing somebody a Stadin slangi word to use in Oulu is a real error, not a detail, so the page has to say which layer a word belongs to.

Read the examples out loud, then bin rather than patch

Finnish punishes a dropped letter: tapan is not tapaan. An example that reads as translated gets deleted rather than repaired, because a card that is slightly wrong is worse than no card - you would go and repeat it.

I co-create this with AI

It generates the illustrations in the drawing style the site uses, it edits copy, and it does research with me. I would rather say that plainly than leave you to work it out.

What is always mine is the curation, the checks and the ideation. Which word is worth a page at all, whether an example sounds like something a person would actually say, what a native speaker corrected, and what gets thrown out instead of patched. Every illustration also carries the standard IPTC tag saying it was machine-made, so anything reading the file can tell without taking my word for it.

Where I have lived

When I first arrived in Helsinki I lived in Kallio, and it was great to get that vibrant, central feel of the city. During covid I moved to Espoo to be closer to nature and lived in Tapiola for a few years. Those walks along the coast are still in my heart.

The last year I was in one of the towers above Redi in Kalasatama, with those views over the gulf and the landscape towards Itäkeskus.

Alongside the open-licence photographs, I am adding my own from living here and exploring the neighbourhoods. The borrowed ones are documentary work by named photographers, with the credit under the picture, because a credit three pages away from a photograph is not really a credit.

Andrey the Nomad in a knitted reindeer sweater and fur hat, mittens up, in a snowy Helsinki park — The sweater is not a costume. It is December.

Andrey the Nomad holding the ear flaps of a fur hat, snow on the trees behind him — Same afternoon, same hat, six minutes later.

Where to find me

Corrections, arguments about a translation, and words I have not covered yet all go to moi@finnishirl.com, and that is easily the most useful mail this site gets. There is more about the project itself on the about page, and the rest of what I do is at andreythenomad.com.

74 words and 39 articles are published so far, with a new word every morning at six.